Revelations of an Abu Ghraib Interrogator

Few people have thought as much about the morality of the US occupation of Iraq than Joshua Casteel, a former US Army interrogator who served at Abu Ghraib prison in the wake of the detainee abuse scandal there.

Once a cadet at the US Military Academy at West Point and raised in an evangelical Christian home, Casteel became a conscientious objector while he was stationed at the prison.

It wasn't the kind of abuse shown in the famous graphic images that made him feel morally compelled to leave the military – Casteel says that kind of behavior had ceased by the time he showed up in June 2004 – but the experience of gleaning information speaking to the detainees in their own language.

Those experiences, and the spiritual awakening Casteel experienced inside the walls of the prison, are contained in "Letters from Abu Ghraib", a compendium of e-mail messages he sent home from the prison, which was published last month by Iowa's Essay Press.

The e-mails, compiled in a lean 118-page volume, are less concerned with the details of prison operations than their moral implications. By what right, the former interrogator asks, does one derive the authority to question prisoners as part of a military occupation?

It's an important question to ask and timely too given the steady growth in the number of Iraqi prisoners in US custody over the course of its occupation of Iraq. Pentagon statistics show the US military now holds over 24,000 "security detainees" in Iraq – more than double the number incarcerated by Coalition at the time of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal four and a half years ago.